In the digital age, organizations must manage increasingly large volumes of data. Content management systems may help members of an organization to access shared organizational data. To this end, content management systems may organize data and structure the presentation of data to make data easy to find, organize, manipulate, and share. For example, content management systems may store and present lists of items. In some examples, these lists of items may be presented as calendars, announcements, contacts, blogs, discussion boards, surveys, and the like. A content management system may also support adding attachments to items in a list.
Because content management systems may manage large amounts of data, an organization may wish to archive some of this data. Archiving is a data storage technique that generally involves migrating data from a primary storage device to a secondary storage device (often in an attempt to reduce storage costs). For example, a business may implement archiving by migrating large amounts of data from high-performance disk drives to a more cost-effective mass storage device.
Unfortunately, archiving list items may cause unwanted inefficiencies by adding latency and other overhead to the retrieval of the list items. Conversely, failing to archive list items may result in large amounts of data going unarchived, because list items may include large attachments. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for efficient data storage for content management systems.